Wilfred Owen Quotes
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These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.
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I, too, saw God through mud
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Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!
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All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.
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The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.
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I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
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The Young Soldier It is not death Without hereafter To one in dearth Of life and its laughter, Nor the sweet murder Dealt slow and even Unto the martyr Smiling at heaven: It is the smile Faint as a (waning) myth, Faint, and exceeding small On a boy's murdered mouth.
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This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
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I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears; and caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts; and buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts; and rusted every bayonet with His tears.
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I thought of all that worked dark pits Of war, and died Digging the rock where Death reputes Peace lies indeed.
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The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.
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Strange friend,' I said,'here is no cause to mourn.' 'None,'said the other,'save the undone years, The hopelessness.Whatever hope is yours Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world.
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I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.
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It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
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Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds, But here the thing's best left at home with friends.
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The old happiness is unreturning. Boy's griefs are not so grievous as youth's yearning. Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.
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Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.
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Winter Song The browns, the olives, and the yellows died, And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide, And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed. From off your face, into the winds of winter, The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing; But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter, When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing, And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going.
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So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
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Whatever mourns when many leave these shores: Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity of tears.
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The marvel is that we did not all die of cold. As a matter of fact, only one of my party actually froze to death before he could be got back, but I am not able to tell how many have ended up in hospital. We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death.
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And some cease feeling Even themselves or for themselves. Dullness best solves The tease and doubt of shelling
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The centuries will burn rich loads With which we groaned, Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids, While songs are crooned: But they will not dream of us poor lads, Left in the ground.
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My subject is war, and the pity of war.
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Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.
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Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
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After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.
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Dead men may envy living mites in cheese, Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys, And subdivide, and never come to death.
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Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
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Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do
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